In the viral video that became known as “What Phish Sounds Like to People Who Don’t Like Phish,” the Vermont jam band performs in front of a field of cheering fans. So far, so Phish. But when the camera points at the bassist, only random diddles are heard. The players’ parts are disconnected and small. The frontman emits gibberish. “You ate my fractal,” he sings obscurely, in a doofed voice, like a “South Park” character.

Originally titled “Phish Shreds IT,” the 2010 video was merely the latest iteration of the “shreds” meme, all of which feature images of bands performing live set to awkwardly strange audio. But the Phish video was the first time the joke had been used in this way, to explain how an oft-reviled band might sound to non-fans. Which suggested that Phish’s popularity is so bizarre, so odious, that their music is the type of nonsense that makes one’s brain throb.

The “IT” in “Phish Shreds IT” refers to their 2003 one-band mega-festival, during which Phish played seven sets over three days in front of over 60,000 fans (counting the all-jam set atop an air traffic control tower but not counting the soundcheck broadcast only heard over their on-site FM station). Typical for Phish, IT was held on a decommissioned Air Force base deep into northeastern Maine. Good, the Phish non-likers might assert, out of sight, out of mind.

But getting out of sight and out of mind are surely goals for many Phishheads, and the entire experience of escaping reality is built into the idea of their festival world. Since Phish’s Clifford Ball in 1996, on another Air Force base near the band’s Burlington, Vermont home, long-haul drives have been built into their festival aesthetic. On the eve of the millennium, they staged their furthest-fuckin’-out event, in Florida, sending 80,000 attendees down Alligator Alley in the Everglades, literally out of the boundaries of the United States—via an 18-hour zone-crossing traffic jam—and into Seminole Indian territory, where the band played an eight-hour midnight-to-sunrise set.

In all cases, what listeners found at the far end of their trips was a world where Phish’s music made complete sense. Call it Stockholm syndrome or a unified artistic vision, but there’s no denying that Phish built an audience and a platform of their own. With vast tracts for campers, playful large-scale installations designed by Vermont comrades connected to the radical Bread and Puppet Theater, unannounced late-night sets, an on-site freeform radio station, food vendors, Porta Potty (and sometimes art installations made from Porta Potty), it was a ready-to-go template that the band staged year after year in the late 1990s and sporadically since. Just as Phish’s music might seem alien, their festival strategy was marked by the reverse of normal music-biz logic: Instead of picking central locations for their events, the band picked destinations seemingly as far away as possible. It wasn’t merely live music, but a contract to enter Tent City, U.S.A., for the duration of the experience.

In the go-go indie ’90s, Phish were among the indie-est of them all, even if they weren’t exactly rock music as many wished to understand it. While they remained on a major label from 1991 until 2004, it was neither Elektra nor the band’s album sales that propelled them to sell out multiple nights at Madison Square Garden. Phish’s most popular and compelling music was distributed for free by the band’s fans, and always had been. By the time of IT in 2003, as the music industry exploded into the blogosphere, Phishheads graduated from cassettes to mp3s and CD-Rs, and soon provided the critical mass to get BitTorrent off the ground, while Phish themselves graduated to selling recordings of all of their shows online within hours of the performance.

Night after night, through improvisation and song-suites, Phish changed in ways both micro and macro, creating new content on a near-daily basis while on tour. Each time Phish plays, fans have new bits of close-listening improv to dissect, new bits of folklore to trade, new bits of themselves to actualize. While there was (and is) a jam hit parade of sorts, a different economy drives the modern live music world that Phish helped create: part drama, part novelty, part boogie, and filled with extreme levels of detail to be pored over later.

All of which is to say that Phish were pipers at the dawn of America’s 21st century festival revival, direct precursors to Bonnaroo, and early builders of an underground railway that eventually led to the collision of dance, jam, and indie subcultures in the vast common ground of the non-metaphoric concert field. While it would be an exaggeration to say that they were responsible for the endless crossovers of the festival circuit, they unquestionably nurtured an audience hungry for constantly changing live music outside the traditional mechanisms of the recording industry.

The scene at Phish’s IT festival, which drew more than 60,000 fans to middle-of-nowhere Maine in 2003. Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic.

When the members of Phish enrolled at the experimental Goddard College, they were a bunch of suburban Deadheads in a far-flung spot in the countercultural empire. Starting primarily as a Grateful Dead cover band, Phish eventually traded in for a repertoire of original music refined during long Vermont winters, long green summers, long practice sessions, and long weekly gigs in Burlington, where they built a hungry audience. The songs followed their own rhythmic muses and logic, a self-conscious attempt at creating a new kind of dance music, filled with palindromes, atonal fugues, and enough classic rock riffs and swing to keep hippies moving. It is here that Phish turns to gibberish for most people, for their insistence on fun, for the levels of expression coded therein.

But despite the band’s oft-precious oddness, this is also why the giant multi-day campout-style music festival remains the musical platform in which Phish make the most sense. It is here that the band fully reconciles their extreme playfulness with the soaring guitar solos that arc through the summer air, over the rolling Vermont hills, and directly into memories. For those inclined to pay attention (and Phish fans do), there’s a lot to pay attention to, though the drugs certainly contribute.

“The internet is to the Phish community what FM radio was for me back in the early ’70s,” Great Northeast Productions promoter Dave Werlin told Pollstar about collaborating with Phish to stage the biggest indie rock fests of the ’90s. It’s a sentiment many would voice over the years, except that Werlin said it in 1999, on the verge of Phish’s millennium shows in Florida, and barely six months after Napster arrived to disrupt the American music industry at large. Using internet-enabled fanbases to create active feedback loops is a route many would come to exploit, but Phish and their Deadhead antecedents were there first, chilling.

As prescient as Phish’s long-haul formula may have been, their festival success emerged in parallel with the ’90s birth of large-scale microcultures, providing a Northeastern counterpart to the early American electronic dance music in the Midwest, the DIY desert adventures of Burning Man, and the swelling ranks of indie rock, to go alongside the post-SoundScan mainstreaming of country and hip-hop. Artists in many of these worlds structured their careers around recorded product and music videos, supplementing it with live appearances. Phish and their jammy ilk found places of their own that Woodstocks ’94 and ’99 seemed to miss entirely—funky, fuzzy destinations for specific musical communities, which reached full flower at their festivals. They picked up fans at New England boarding schools, frat houses, and liberal arts colleges alike; their shows were expected to be freethinking and generally apolitical zones, welcoming and loving to anyone who could tolerate the music.

The last time Great Northeast Productions put on a Phish festival, in 2004, it was a disaster in many ways, though it wasn’t the promoter’s fault. Heavy rains more or less destroyed the concert site before the fest even began, and the storms continued to batter the area. As cars pulled off in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom and hit the traditional zone-crossing traffic jam, the order came for Phish and Great Northeast Productions to tell people to turn around. The band’s freeform radio station interrupted their all-night fun with a taped bummer from Phish bassist Mike Gordon. Fans were now faced with a moral choice about whether to listen to the stated wishes of their favorite band or to ignore them and trek on at their own peril. Compounding the decision-making was the fact that Phish had announced their impending breakup three months earlier.

An estimated 65,000 of 70,000 ticket buyers made it in, some weathering cross-country drives, 36-hour traffic stints, and 15-mile hikes to the concert grounds. These shows—a festival called Coventry in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom in August 2004—would be the band’s final performances. In the blooming age of cross-platform storytelling and common-sense money-making, the shows were to be beamed out into movie theaters nationwide as well. In the midst of all of this, and almost certainly near the heart of the band’s decision to disband, were the substance abuse issues that had crept up among them, making the wheels come off the bus even as they continued to go ’round and ’round.

Coventry was the type of legitimately emotional performance that doesn’t often occur in popular music. There were mid-song tears, musical collapses, a few hot jams, and a palpably odd energy, all amid a boulder-strewn stage set designed to prevent further mudslides.

“We’re not about to do a free-form jazz exploration in front of a festival crowd,” David St. Hubbins barked in This Is Spinal Tap, but Phish built themselves a platform to do exactly that. In terms of the possibility of artistic creation afforded by a music festival, Coventry represented one possibility pushed to near-total bleakness. “Worst goodbye ever,” read one fan-made T-shirt featuring Comic Book Guy from “The Simpsons.” But it was powerful art. Though the band kept playing their familiar songs, their world had broken down, and it showed no signs of ever making sense again.

This particular Phish festival likewise came during the dawn of the new festival season. One true and deep characteristic of festivals, going back at least to Woodstock, was a guaranteed escape. If a giant news event occurred somewhere out yonder, it might only arrive in Tent City via rumor. Cell phones hit ubiquity around the time of IT and Coventry, but all-access internet hadn’t yet landed; a trip to northern Vermont could be coordinated, but when the shit hit the fans and the band had to tell people to go home, it came by short-range FM radio.

Phish’s “farewell” festival in 2004 was a disaster in many ways—but it still drew tens of thousands and turned out to be a legitimately emotional experience. Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc.

By the time Phish reformed in 2009, accepting a slower pace, they sounded like themselves again, crisp and filled with detailed rhythmic punchlines and longform musical narratives. But the festival world had shifted around them, turning into a national circuit for bands of all genres. First staged in 2002, Bonnaroo—built on the jammy networks that Phish had nurtured—spread into nearly every musical territory imaginable, surfing an even bigger audience by tapping into jam fans’ open-mindedness toward fun-compliant live acts.

While Phish occasionally show up to play many-band extravaganzas, they are content to stick to themselves, too, and continue to stage their own festivals from time to time. But when they do—as in 2015’s Magnaball, population ~30,000—the events continue to tap into something that most festivals of equivalent size miss. While jam/electronic getaways like Camp Bisco and Electric Forest have their roots in the Phish world, Phish’s closest modern kin are perhaps more easily found in smaller fan-friendly events like the improv/avant-friendly Big Ears in Knoxville, with an emphasis on the intimate musical experience, even at scale. Lately, Phish have moved into luxury destination territory, having announced their second visit to a Mexican resort for 2017, though Phish fans—both recovering and active—have long constituted a reliable pocket of attendees at places like Big Ears and the earlier, more functional American iterations of All Tomorrow’s Parties.

In many ways, it’s a formula that few rock festivals have repeated because few have really tried: the creation of a space for absolute hyper-focused listening with the performance of the musicians at the unquestionable fixed center. Besides the advent of VIP camping and a few ticket-pricing confusions, perhaps the most controversial aspect of MagnaBall among Phish fans was whether or not the improvisation that followed “Prince Caspian” constituted a return to the song “Tweezer” or was merely reminiscent of it.

Though with unquestionable countercultural roots, Phish generated an entirely different set of parameters and concerns from the lamplight of Coachella, the active participation of Burning Man, the something-for-everybody parties of Outside Lands and elsewhere, the surf and turf deliciousness of JazzFest, the blissed-out multi-day electronic dance-outs, the yoga bend-ins, and even the so-called transformational festivals that have spread across Europe. Phish festivals aren’t about counterculture or psychedelics or even the vaunted community. They are about music—a hilarious, cruel, or absolutely fitting punchline that’s far funnier than any viral video could possibly convey.

This story originally appeared in our print quarterly, The Pitchfork Review. Buy back issues of the magazine here.